The Final: Sam
(Cardiff), Clint (Cardiff), Ian (last year's winner) Congrats to Sam, the new
3 player Man.... (Cheese), Clint came 2nd (that's me). Bad luck Ian and Ed (for
meeting me in the 5th round - otherwise likely it would have been an all Cardiff
final). "Immolate to Accumulate", concept by Gaz Hooley, designed
by the Cardiff Cartel. (We tested around 25 other deck designs but none came
up to the raw cheapness or versatility of this deck). 3 of the 4 Cardiff players
played some variant of Immolate, Sam and I got through to the final winning
all the games along the way.

Cutest deck I saw
was Hippy Dave's Sam Simian, Mountain Fortress deck. As always it was great
to meet up with fellow SFisters and meet some old favourites and new decks as
well.

Comment from
Andy Holt: This "one trick pony" could be relatively easily defeated
with a deck that was expecting such but was devastating in a field of mainly
quick/limited denial decks (even Alex's deck didn't always manage to hold them
to full time). I don't think there were any SSG cards in the DT decks.

Correct. No S&SG
in the Immolate deck none were appropriate enough for this deck (the stealth
gain a power card for ascended was considered but basically the deck runs on
2 power a turn). We designed around 20 decks and tested them out (3 or 4 Jammer,
5 or so Monarch decks (including a recycling Sacred Wigwam/Ice Commandos deck,
a recycling Thunder deck), a couple of Lotus, 1 Dragon deck [I nearly played
that], 3 or 4 Purist decks [get off my land types], one Orange deck, a couple
of Hand decks - Ed played my Sword Saint deck and came 4th, a cop deck or 3,
1 artillery strike deck with the Rise of the NeoBuro amongst others - actually
thinking about it there were more than 20 decks tested in total).

As to it being
a one trick pony - methinks I disagree - it covers most eventualities - bit
like saying a dragon deck puts down a big lad and attacks - this has 10 of them
[admittedly all the same] - the final saw 49 points of fighting vs 30... :-)
There are weaknesses to the deck but we had 2 other main iterations [various
minor iterations] of the deck that dealt with a different environment but they
were felt not needed in the 3 player format. We'd also considered how to deal
with that should it come up but mostly after a short period of time the deck
went 2:1 so that's why we played it. I thought it was a bit of a basic deck
but it's actually a very subtle deck - lots of options for play (one game had
to sit and think for a couple of minutes to get the "best" play, and
playing against Ed there was lots of interesting play options trying to get
events past his Confucians for example).